Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences

by Kitty Burns Florey, Becky Kraemer

Overview

A SLATE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
 
A PEOPLE PICK FOR WORD LOVERS
 
“This gem from copyeditor Florey is a bracing ode to grammar.”—People
 
In its heyday, sentence diagramming was wildly popular in grammar schools across the country. Kitty Burns Florey learned the method in sixth grade from Sister Bernadette: "It was a bit like art, a bit like mathematics. It was a picture of language. I was hooked.”
Now, in Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog, an offbeat history that any language lover will adore, Florey explores the sentence-diagramming phenomenon and what diagrams of famous writers' sentences reveal about them.
Along the way, she offers up her own commonsense approach to learning and using good grammar. And she answers some of literature's most pressing questions: Was Mark Twain or James Fenimore Cooper a better grammarian? Can knowing how to diagram a sentence make your life better? And what's Gertrude Stein got to do with any of it?
 
“A pleasantly discursive and affectionate tribute to an antiquated art.”—The Wall Street Journal
 
“You don't have to be over age 50 or a Catholic school graduate to enjoy Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog . . . Florey's keen memories of being schooled in this art and her humorous affection for it are contagious . . . Try it, you’ll like it."—Minneapolis Star Tribune
 
"Florey writes with verve about the nuns who taught her to render the English language as a mess of slanted lines, explains how diagrams work, and traces the bizarre history of the men who invented this odd pedagogical tool . . . It’s a great read."—Slate
 
KITTY BURNS FLOREY , a veteran copyeditor, is the author of nine novels and many short stories and essays. A longtime Brooklyn resident, she now divides her time between central Connecticut and upstate New York with her husband, Ron Savage.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780156034432
Publisher:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication date:	11/05/2007
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	176
Sales rank:	79,724
Product dimensions:	7.12(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.46(d)

About the Author

Kitty Burns Florey, a veteran copyeditor, is the author of nine novels and many short stories and essays.

Kitty's attending parochial school from 1st to 12th grade at St. John the Baptist Academy inspired her book, Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog.

A longtime Brooklyn resident, she now divides her time between central Connecticut and upstate New York with her husband, Ron Savage.

Kitty can be found online at: kittyburnsflorey.com

Read an Excerpt

Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog

The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences

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By Florey, Kitty Burns

Harvest Books

Copyright © 2007 Florey, Kitty Burns
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780156034432

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chapter 1
 
ENTER THE DOG
 
Diagramming sentences is one of those lost skills, like darning socks or playing the sackbut, that no one seems to miss. When it was introduced in an 1877 text called Higher Lessons in English by Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg, it swept through American public schools like the measles, embraced by teachers as the way to reform students who were engaged in (to take Henry Higgins slightly out of context) “the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue.” By promoting the beautifully logical rules of syntax, diagramming would root out evils like “him and me went” and “I ain’t got none,” until everyone wrote like Ralph Waldo Emerson, or at least James Fenimore Cooper.1
 
 
1         I’m thinking here of Mark Twain’s famous and still highly entertaining essay, “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” in which Twain concludes that “in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 literary offenses out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.” But Wilkie Collins called Cooper “the greatestartist in the domain of romantic fiction in America.”
 
 
           Even in my own youth, many years after 1877, diagramming was serious business. I learned it in the sixth grade from Sister Bernadette.
 
           Sister Bernadette: I can still see her, a tiny nun with a sharp pink nose, confidently drawing a dead-straight horizontal line like a highway across the blackboard, flourishing her chalk in the air at the end of it, her veil flipping out behind her as she turned back to the class. We begin, she said, with a straight line. And then, in her firm and saintly script, she put words on the line, a noun and a verb—probably something like dog barked. Between the words she drew a short vertical slash, bisecting the line. Then she drew a road—a short country lane—that forked off at an angle under the word dog, and on it she wrote The. 
 
 
           That was it: subject, predicate, and the little modifying article that civilized the sentence—all of it made into a picture that was every bit as clear and informative as an actual portrait of a beagle in midwoof. The thrilling part was that this was a picture not of the animal but of the words that stood for the animal and its noises. It was a representation of something that was both concrete (we could hear the words if we said them aloud, and they conveyed an actual event) and abstract (the words were invisible, and their sounds vanished from the air as soon as they were uttered). The diagram was the bridge between a dog and the description of a dog. It was a bit like art, a bit like mathematics. It was much more than words uttered, or words written on a piece of paper: it was a picture of language.
 
           I was hooked. So, it seems, were many of my contemporaries. Among the myths that have attached themselves to memories of being educated in the ’50s is the notion that activities like diagramming sentences (along with memorizing poems and adding long columns of figures without a calculator) were draggy and monotonous. I thought diagramming was fun, and most of my friends who were subjected to it look back with varying degrees of delight. Some of us were better at it than others, but it was considered a kind of treat, a game that broke up the school day. You took a sentence, threw it against the wall, picked up the pieces, and put them together again, slotting each word into its pigeonhole. When you got it right, you made order and sense out of what we used all the time and took for granted: sentences. Those ephemeral words didn’t just fade away in the air but became chiseled in stone—yes, this is a sentence, this is what it’s made of, this is what it looks like, a chunk of English you can see and grab onto.
 
           I remember loving the look of the sentences, short or long, once they were tidied into diagrams—the curious geometric shapes they made, their maplike tentacles, the way the words settled primly along their horizontals like houses on a road, the way some roads were culs de sac and some were long meandering interstates with many exit ramps and scenic lookouts. And the perfection of it all, the ease with which—once they were laid open, all their secrets exposed—those sentences could be comprehended.
 
           On a more trivial, preteen level, part of the fun was being summoned to the blackboard to show off your skills. There you’d be with your chalk while, with a glint in her eye, Sister Bernadette read off an especially tricky sentence. Compact, fastidious handwriting was an asset. A good spatial sense helped you arrange things so that the diagram didn’t end up jammed against the edge of the blackboard like commuters in a subway car. The trick was to think fast, write fast, and try not to get rattled if you failed nobly in the attempt.

Copyright © 2006 Kitty Burns Florey
 
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
 
Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be submitted online at www.harcourt.com/contact or mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc., 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

Continues...

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Excerpted from Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog by Florey, Kitty Burns Copyright © 2007 by Florey, Kitty Burns. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

1 ENTER THE DOG

17 TIMES CHANGE

35 GENERAL RULES

61 POETRY & GRAMMAR

103 YOUSE AIN’T GOT NO CLASS

125 DIAGRAMMING REDUX

147 Afterword

151 acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

"Kitty Burns Florey seems to write from a great wellspring of inner calm that derives from a gleeful appreciation of life’s smallest details."
—Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls

"This book is not a primer; it’s a prize."
—Robert Hartwell Fiske, author of The Dictionary of Disagreeable English

"A wistful, charming and funny ode to a nearly lost art. Those who remember will cheer. Those who don’t will wonder what fun they missed and whether it will be preserved for future generations. All will agree Florey’s passion is infectious and entertaining."
—June Casagrande, author of Grammar Snobs are Great Big Meanies

From the Publisher